Dear Sukhi,
I remember how difficult it was working out what to do with my feelings of love for the first person I fell in love with. I was a BK and so was she. I had no desire to sleep with her. We agreed that we wanted to be married in the Golden Age, and we were very happy with that. The difficulty came when the Seniors found out and responded to us as if our love was a bad thing. For them, it could not be love - it had to be lust and attachment. They treated us as if it was a dirty little secret, a thing to be ashamed of.
We had been planning to do exactly nothing with it, we were both totally committed to our BK lives and we lived in different countries. It was love, unconsummated and pretty much un-enacted in any way accept for a letter every month or so, in which the only thing we talked about was Gyan. It was much the same feeling I had for Baba and indeed for Dadi Janki, so if my feelings for this Sister were wrong then I for one did not know what love was. And even though I was extremely innocent, naive and unsophisticated, I could see that the Seniors were making a complete mess of managing us. Instead of making us feel so bad, they should have praised us for the way did not let our feelings distract us from our commitments.
I concluded that I had no choice but to trust love, to trust that I was a being of love and that if doing that involved lessons then I should be humble enough to learn. Being frozen into doing nothing, risking nothing, trying nothing was not virtue, it was not purity it was sterility, it was cowardice. I decided that believing I was a soul meant I had to trust my intuition. It was the same intuition that told me this was God. I remember thinking that if my heart led me out of Gyan, I really should have the courage to follow it and if I did, and Gyan was right for me, it would lead me back to Gyan as well.
Following my heart meant nothing in practice with that Sister, except refusing to agree that we had done anything wrong. All we had done was feel love for each other. If that was wrong, then the whole of the Golden Age was wrong.
Well, nothing physical ever did happen with that Sister and we stayed in contact for many years - decades in fact until her death last year. When I left Gyan she cried, and then a few years after she left as well. She travelled half way round the world to be at my wedding. And she sent t-shirts for my little sons when they were born. And when she died, I wrote to her mother to tell her that her daughter was always and will always be loved by me.
I fell in love with another fellow BK and I consciously allowed myself to spend time with her. And when the relationship grew physical, I let it happen because whilst I could now see that I was breaking rules I was not convinced where the virtue stopped and the vice began. By that point, I did not trust the rules. I knew at the time that the price would be high, and it was. I was prepared to make mistakes and pay for them rather than do nothing. Using one’s own mind is not a sin, it is an obligation. Losing one's virginity in Gyan is an extremely difficult business and for many young and vulnerable people it is frequently a dangerous time. For me, it is the thing I am most proud of in my whole Brahmin life, except for the way I left.
My heart goes out to you and I want to offer my support for whatever you decide to do. I am extremely happily married and I do not have the slightest trace of guilt about my sexual relationship with my wife but that does not mean I have any right to think I know what is best for you.
The truth is that love comes with pain, and growth comes with pain, and learning comes with pain. But that doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong. Here is what I think: Never turn away from the love in front of you. And never let anyone or anything tell you to. It is for you to decide what is right for yourself. But being frozen by fear is not spirituality.
The one thing I like about the BK theology is that we are not created by God, we are independent beings and have been such as long as he has. It is your right and obligation to think for yourself and choose for yourself. It is a little bit silly to feel guilt for something you freely choose. And so what if they turn out to be right and you don’t get a big palace? Who gives a **** about that? I would rather have my life now, with my wife and my boys, than all the births of the Golden Age. And I would rather be a real human being than a little puppet, and get rewarded for sitting on the fence.
I have no idea if the BK god is really God. Even if I still believed in God, which I don’t, the question would be irrelevant. The question for me is does he reflect my values, does he speak to the highest in me? The answer is, no. I not only disagree with him, I actually think he is morally inferior to me. I think he is small-minded and small-hearted. I do not mind if he judges me and finds me guilty, I do the same for him so I can hardly complain. The point is I am not concerned how I look in his eyes. I am concerned how I look in my eyes, and the people I truly look up to. The wondrous thing about free will is that I get to live my life my way and choose my values and choose my mistakes.
The BK god speaks peace, but so does the American military. His action has been to come and start a war inside of people. He has set off a war inside of you. A war between your love of “God” and your love of your husband, between your so-called spiritual nature and your physical nature, between you and nature!, between your body and your thoughts. He has made you afraid of yourself. He has planted in you images of self-destruction that he wants you to bring to mind whenever you think of sleeping with your husband. He has sadistic tendencies. He is complicit in suicide. Indeed you have to wonder if they constitute manslaughter.
Daily programming for years of vulnerable young people so that they want to kill themselves and sometimes do if they contemplate sex or have sex. Am I saying he is not God? No, he could be God, I do not know; all I am saying is that whether he is or not, I reject him. I do better without his advice and I am certainly not afraid of his judgment. Dharam Raj? Dharam bullshiit. The guilt and fear that is paralyzing you has been programmed into you by listening daily to the Murli. I am sorry about that, and unfortunately it seems to take a long time to recover from. Morality and spirituality consist in freely chosen actions and thoughts.
To the extent we have been exposed to this programming our capacity for free choice has been diminished. Even if it genuinely is the case that purity is good (and I personally don’t believe this), you are not being pure. You are abstaining from sex because you have been programmed to feel like death whenever you think about it. That is not the same as purity. There is nothing spiritual in this aspect of BK teaching. Is there genuine good in parts of the BK life and beliefs – definitely - but not in this area. In this area they have badly gone wrong. The BKs haven’t made you pure they have just incapacitated you.
You have to re-learn thinking for yourself and feeling for yourself. You have to take responsibility for yourself, and allow yourself to live your life and accept that you will make mistakes, but we do not get to know what all the mistakes will be before we make them. For me, celibacy was a much bigger mistake than sex was. But, hey, you are a good person and you will learn from your mistakes whatever they will be. Any reasonable god would ask no more of you.
And as for the unreasonable ones, perhaps life is already hard enough without us also trying to fulfil their impossible, unhealthy and downright sadistic demands. And this is a god who has already proved himself wrong on some very important issues. He has been wrong about when the world will end, about how many souls there are and other things you think an omniscient being would know. I ask you – what kind of Father does not know how many children he has?
I hope that you choose what is best for you, but I will be honest that I hope you choose in your own time, and only if it is right for you, life instead of death. Sex is creation. Sex is life. I feel sorry for all those BKs who will never know it, and will never know the incomparable joy of having their own children. BK celibacy (I will not call it purity) is about death, not life. It is not right that people your age should spend their youth preparing for death. BKs theories of Destruction are already discredited, and if they have half the spirituality they claim, they would admit as such. I was a BK back in the 1970s when Destruction was supposed to come. People gave up their jobs, cashed in their savings – I very nearly did not study for my exams. We were all so sure, and we were all so wrong. But hey, tomorrow is another day.
Some researchers once interviewed a large group of very old people – people who were literally on their death beds – people who were about to go and meet their maker. They asked them if they had any common regrets – had they done enough charity, been good enough, done enough interesting things etc. They nearly all said they wished they had had more sex.
Big hugs
Eugene
PS If you decide to go for it make sure that you commit yourself to celebrating it. Decide ahead of time that it will be an act of spiritual, life-affirming, love-creating celebration, something that you have to be proud of. And if you let us know when it is going to be we will all break open a bottle of champagne on your behalf at the designated moment
.